


Seems We Aren't Going to Die After All

by HyperionScience



Category: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Genre: And Still No Tea, F/M, Fenchurch isn't actually in it, Fix-It, Gen, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Other, Post-Canon, bookverse, general confusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2017-05-19
Packaged: 2018-10-22 02:04:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10687521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HyperionScience/pseuds/HyperionScience
Summary: Takes place immediately following Mostly Harmless, completely ignores And Another Thing (To be honest, I haven't read it yet)Nobody dies actually, Random finally finds where she belongs, and Zaphod takes Arthur's advice for once.





	Seems We Aren't Going to Die After All

**Author's Note:**

> I hate that this fandom is so inactive. So now you get Hitchhiker's guide fic. I don't make the rules. 
> 
> Teen rating for drinking, foul language, and a fun reference to activities best performed on the wing of a Boeing 747, (and those performed to pay for trips around the universe). Unbeta'd. Started April 21st, 2017.

**Seems We Aren't Going to Die After All**

 

 

 

  "Ford." Said Arthur, his voice slowly getting higher, his mouth drawing out the name for several syllables more than one would have any reason to.

  "Arthur." Replied Ford, in the same tired tone he had taken with him countless times before. A tone with which he was often told not to panic, or to find his towel, or that for the millionth goddamned time we haven't got any tea.

  "Trillian." Arthur sidetracked, looking to his left and feeling both confused and relieved to see her there, though his voice stayed somewhat level in his goal to get her to, ultimately, take his side. 

  "Ford." Trillian looked at him. If this was the afterlife, she really didn't want to be stuck explaining it to Arthur. 

  "Random!" Shouted Arthur, who just remembered that she had been pointing a gun at them. Random said nothing, but looked at him guiltily, with tear-stained cheeks.

  "Hey, woah!" Said Zaphod's left head to his right, pleasantly surprised to find it still there. 

  Ford Prefect rubbed his hands together, clapped once, and made his way behind the bar. 

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

 

  "I don't think," Arthur started, the open and half consumed bottle of that Ol' Janx Spirit helping to reflect the look he received from Zaphod indicating that he was quite certain it was a suitable place to end the sentence, "That we've really discussed enough how you named our daughter after some of my more... er, shameful habits." 

  Random, who never put much thought into the origins of her middle name, nearly choked on her soda. At least, she thought with relief, it wasn't alcohol. She had always invariably found that watching others drink themselves silly was more fun that drinking oneself silly, and had been watching with amusement as Ford performed his best impression of a parka, wrapping himself around her father with a sort of flexibility that she could only assume came from various dislocated limbs. 

  Trillian shrugged. "I thought it was funny."

  "If anyone should be called Frequent-Flyer Dent, Arthur," Ford said, too loudly, directly into Arthur's ear. "It's you."

  "And what's that supposed to mean?!" Arthur sputtered, placing the bottle on the counter, where Zaphod collected it and tossed back the rest. 

  "It means exactly what you think it means." 

  And before an astonished and scandalized Arthur Dent could open his mouth with a reply he hadn't yet thought up, the room was suddenly filled with ten thousand hamsters. 

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

 

  Random watched as the bar began to grow spots, stretching out into the infinity of either side of them. The hamsters donned their large purple business hats, and their tinfoil briefcases, walking one by one into the worn and threadbare left pocket of Arthur's dressing gown. The ceiling fell in, turning to paper confetti before hitting the ground, and above them, the sky was open, clear, and a nerve-wracking shade of orange. Zaphod's hair was the same nerve-wracking shade of orange.  Ford's impression of a parka had been seriously improved by the fact that he was, in fact, a parka, and the walls began to emit a cool, green light, which was warm to the touch. Trillian looked up, and thought for a moment, her head becoming that of a swordfish, and then turning back.

  "We're in an Improbability Field-" 

  And anything else she meant to say was stopped, as she slowly transformed into a moth.

  Random reached for her gun, only to find that it was a hand, a human one. Attached to the hand was the body of a woman, and attached to her body, her head. She blinked at Random. Arthur's head, on a platter carried by his headless body, stared at her. by the time his hands had twisted his head back on, she was gone, and Random was holding something almost, but not completely, entirely unlike a pigeon. She let it go, and it flew up into the orange sky, bursting like a firework seconds later. 

  "Wow." Said Zaphod, who's second head had become a balloon.

  "Wow Indeed." Replied Ford, sitting down on a barstool that had just seconds ago been a snare drum.

  Trillian emerged from a cocoon behind the bar, which was now devoid of polka dots.

  "Zaphod." She said, looking at him, the balloon popping to reveal his head underneath. "Don't you know what this means?"

  "Er... I need a new pair of sunglasses?" He pulled his scratched up Joo-Janta Peril Sensitive Sunglasses from his pocket. "See? They aren't dark at all! I can see everything."

  "That's because," Trillian explained, knowing that with Zaphod, it was best to explain things, even if he was smart enough to figure them out on his own, "we're not in any danger."

  "This does all seem oddly familiar." Said Arthur, plucking the last hamster out of his pocket.  

  "As well it should." Said a morose voice from the door. The bar was gone now, and so were the stools, and so were, to the dismay of all parties, all of the bottles of booze.  

  "Welcome, once again," said Marvin, with a scowl in his voice, "aboard the starship Heart of Gold."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

 

  "So you're a robot then?" Said Random to Marvin, as he showed her around the ship, avoiding as well as he could the more talkative doors. He'd been growing quite sick of them, and now he had a rather talkative human on his hands. 

  "Yes." He droned, miserably. Of course, Trillian had tasked him with this. Why not add to the pain in the diodes up his left side? He had just saved them from certain death, and he was back to being a lowly android, treated worse than a butler. "I don't see what's so great about it." He tacked on, for good measure.

  "Seems better than being a human. At least you've got a home."

  "All I've got," Marvin went on, "is a brain the size of a planet and a terrible pain in the diodes up my left side." 

  "Nobody's ever fixed it?" Random stopped walking for a moment, looking at him. Her hand collided with the broken pieces of Arthur's watch in the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt.

  "Of course not." The robot pouted. "Nobody listens to the needs of a menial service android, especially one as terribly depressed as I am." 

  Random looked at him. "What a sad existence," she thought to herself, solemnly. She reached out and wrapped her fingers around his cold metallic arm. 

  "I can fix it. Probably." Her fingers once again brushed the metal gears in her pocket, and she frowned. 

  "I seriously doubt it." Marvin sighed, but followed along as she dragged him back towards the bridge. 

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

 

  "You're doing it again." Said Ford, conversationally.

  "Doing what again?" Arthur asked, indignantly, from his perch on a barstool inside the Heart of Gold, a bottle cradled to his chest. 

  "Thinking. Quick, tell me how it's a lovely day, or how we're all going to die."

  "We're all going to die?" He asked again, fixing the majority of his puffy-eyed stare on Ford, who thought he looked a bit too much like a kicked puppy to bode well for anyone. 

  "No." He said simply.

  "Oh." Arthur replied, seeming to almost droop a bit, though at a second glance, perhaps he was only relaxing again. "Listen, I know what I saw,"

  "At an improbability factor of two to the power of four hundred ninety-four thousand eight hundred and thirty-one to one against, Arthur." Trillian chimed in, from the doorway. It is interesting to note that this was Tricia MacMillan, not Trillian Astra, and she had spent the last fifteen minutes coming to terms with, and subsequently looking for, the daughter she had never had. She strode over to the bar and plucked the bottle from Arthur's hands. "I don't know who this woman is, but she's gone."

  "We were all _gone_ , Trillian. We were dead. I'm still not certain we aren't dead, I..." He stopped, and his brain began to work again. He looked at her, and yes, he certainly had been crying. Even still a single tear hung stubbornly to the bottom of his chin, where it seemed hell-bent on drying. Ford reached out and caught it with his towel. Arthur scowled at his slippers. "She isn't coming back."

  "No."

  "Well then." Said Arthur, rising from his seat, "I think I ought to go find Marvin. I have a feeling I may be able to lift his spirits, if only by the rules of relativity." 

  Ford and Trillian watched him go, both internally remarking on how downtrodden he seemed, and wondering silently how much the other knew about what had put him in this mood, which was, in both cases, absolutely nothing at all. 

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

 

  Zaphod Beeblebrox walked into the medbay to find the monkey's daughter trying to solder some of Marvin's wires to one another. She noticed him, but said nothing, only giving him a look that she likely intended as some sort of challenge. It was a look that Trillian had made him quite familiar with. 

 "Don't waste your time, kid." He said, walking over, his right head leaning down to inspect her handiwork. It was a little crude, perhaps, but competent. "He's just gonna complain about it."

   Random frowned. Zaphod was quite familiar with this look as well, it was practically Arthur's calling card. "I figured nobody could fault me for trying to do a good thing... And I was curious to see how he worked." 

  Zaphod nodded, closing up the hatch on Marvin's side, and pressing the reboot button. "Hey, nobody's mad or anything. I just figured you oughtta know that nobody's gonna thank you, either." She was, Zaphod decided, a good kid. He saw very little of Arthur in her. Marvin slowly sat up. 

  "I thought you said you were going to fix it." He droned, getting up off the table. "Good job you did of that, I don't feel any different. 

  "See what I mean?"

  Random nodded, and watched Marvin wander off. She turned to Zaphod, and watched him shake his heads. 

  "One of these days, someone's gonna throw him into space." 

  And with that, he left her alone in the medbay, following Marvin out into the ship.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

 

  It was a day or two before everyone, finally well rested and to terms with the fact that they really weren't dead, met on the bridge of the starship Heart of Gold. Trillian stood next to Zaphod, and looked at Arthur across the room. She would be the first to admit that her relationships with both of them were, at best, strained. Zaphod attempted to put one of his left arms around her. She stepped out of the way. 

  If Zaphod noticed, he only cast her a small, confused glance, and that was quickly swallowed up by Ford Prefect, crossing his arms and loudly stating that while he does, in theory, have all day, he'd prefer to spend it doing something other that stand about on the bridge thank-you-very-much. 

  Arthur wandered up to Zaphod, who glared at him, but Arthur only rolled his eyes. 

  "Did you know," He said, quietly, as if he were letting him in on a secret, "That relationships work a lot like flying? Sometimes all it takes is to fall, and then miss." He smiled, as if he had just said something very clever indeed, and for once, Zaphod felt inclined to agree with him. 

  He walked over to Trillian, and whispered something in her ear. She sighed, and began to punch the coordinates in. Random watched them, with passing interest. 

  It occurred to her that everyone else on the ship felt just as lost as she did, and for the first time in her life, she stood on a spaceship drifting aimlessly through space, and felt, honestly and truly, that she was home.

  

**Author's Note:**

> Random wasn't originally going to be in this, but as the first paragraph morphed into a nice place to pick up after the events of Mostly Harmless, I realized that I had on my hands the perfect opportunity to finally give Random a home on the Heart of Gold. It slowly became slightly Random-centric, so... you're welcome. Marvin wasn't going to be in it either, but I couldn't help myself.


End file.
